How to survive an earthquake

An earthquake is a natural calamity that can strike anyone, anywhere, and you most know how to survive, how to protect yourself during an earthquake.

An earthquake comes without warning. Although there are some zones that are prone to earthquakes and people there usually remain prepared for the earth-shaking events, some regions experience earthquakes out of the blues.

This link has a list of things you can do to survive an earthquake.
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Are you bored of downloading custom Photoshop brushes from various websites and need something unique for a Photoshop brush? Well, you can easily create your own custom Photoshop brush using a pre-made image, or a new image, or a shape.

Why would you need a custom Photoshop brush? By default when you select the brush tool it is a solid circle and when you draw with it the ball moves on the screen leaving a trail in your selected color. What if for this trail you want stars, or leaves, or a human eye? The sky is the limit when it comes to using a custom Photoshop brush.

The link tells you how to create a custom Photoshop button.
Technorati Tags: photoshop, photoshop brushes

Sometimes when you are searching for news or updates on Google you want to see pages that have been most recently updated. For instance, if you are writing an article in global warming, you would like to know what all has been written on the topic of global warming today, or in the past 3 days, or during the past week. There is no direct interface on Google that lets you search results by day and week, but you can manipulate the search string to achieve the desired result.

For instance, first search for “global warming” (with or without quotes), and then whatever appears in the URL (it is also termed as the query string by the technically gifted) just append &as_qdr=d in the last and hit the enter button. It sorts the results by day and for the consecutive queries it even presents to you with a drop-down menu that lets you sort the search results by days, weeks, months, etc. Go to the Techcrunch blog for a detailed description.

Not only Twitter, you can use any social networking and bookmarking website to increase traffic to your blog or website. For instance, many people have their servers crashed by the Digg surges that happen when their links appear higher on Digg. Still, Twitter has its own mechanism. In fact I’ve been using Twitter for a few months now and this is perhaps the only social networking website that I use with regularity, although I’ve hardly interacted with people whom I am following or who are following me.

Darren at Problogger has a post on how he drives traffic to his blog through Twitter. He regularly posts links to his latest blog posts on his Twitter feeds. He also uses Twitter to get new blogging idea and to obtain information from other Twitter users.

Just imagine what all we could achieve if we could improve our memory tremendously. Some psychologists believe that whenever we learn something, memorize something, it gets stored somewhere in our memory and it is never deleted from our memory. We forget it because we cannot recall it. Once we develop this ability to recall things as and when we need to, we have got ourselves a great memory.

Do you know how to improve your memory? Just repeat whatever you have learned exactly when you are about to forget it. Now how can you know when you are about to forget something that you have recently learned. By using a software called SuperMemo. Read this excellent Wired article that throws some good light on how you can improve your memory by using simple techniques promoted by the developer of this software.

It’s better to write search engine friendly URLs rather than letting your web designer or  the CMS generate dynamic URLs. A dynamic URL is something like this:

http://mysite.com/showpage.php?p=1

A search engine friendly URL on the other hand would be:

http://mysite.com/copywriting-services

assuming you provide copywriting services.

Most of the content management systems have this feature inbuilt — you can set them to re-write URLs. But in case your CMS doesn’t provide this feature, then you can tweak your .htaccess file to re-write URLs. Roshan on his blog tells you how to re-write your URLs using your .htaccess file.

Ripping DVDs I’m sure is not a new topic as almost everybody who can do it rips DVDs. Whenever you want to rip DVDs using your PC the main question is what software to use, whether to compress or not, and where to store the ripped DVDs. DVDs are fragile compared to the older VHS cassettes we used to have. DVDs easily get scratched and spoiled, so it makes sense to take timely backups. Due to cheaper storage availability you can easily rip your entire DVD collection and store it either on your PC or some external hard drive. This Lifehacker post takes you through the entire process of ripping DVDs using your PC.

This link has been submitted by Carina White:

How to rip DVD movie on Mac OS X

I mostly use GIMP these days but I know you can do some really cool things that you can do with Photoshop. This tutorial tells you how to create/draw a traffic cone with Photoshop.

Most of the hacking happens because the person writing the PHP code leaves some scope for hacking. For instance, a hacker can use the script that you create to process the form input. You can easily avoid such kind of hacking by writing secure PHP code, explained here.